DISQUS

The tray in the left background looks good too! Happy WW, and thanks for your visit.

What beautiful creature. Hope it made it across the road safely! Happy WW!

Hi Jonathan! Maybe I am not reading the post correctly, but I am on the site and I see both the visible and hidden images?

This would be a great technique, but the flaw you point out makes it useless for the kind of message I would want to appear on a scraper's site! hehe.

But if you use it only for attribution, I would think there could be a way to come up with an image that would be unobtrusive to feed readers and provide a visual attribution link or two in the content n the scrapers site.

And if you could take it a step further and make the "hidden" content text and images and long enough, it might get around duplicate content to a small extent? In other words, don't just put in an image, but actually add some content that only appears in the feed, not on the original post. I don't know enough about how duplicate content is judged to know if this would make a difference, maybe you do?

-Will

on edit: I don't see a way to subscribe to a comment thread to get email notification of follow up comments. Did you remove it, or am I blind?

I think your one point about the "time sink" encompasses 90% of the frustrated bloggers. I know I find my stuff scraped whenever I look, so I stopped looking. It is just too frustrating and time consuming. The thieves are just overrunning the fort!

If I get a ping or trackback that leads me to a scraper, I will take the time to delete the pooing and try to find out the host of the scraper. I then will email the abuse department at the host. Once or twice, they took action after checking out the site. The usual response is to demand a full DMCA, and that is where I stop making the effort.

I don't have enough time to deal with the issue, especially since I make virtually no money from my site. People who make an income from their sites and take the time needed to deal with scrapers are probably using up more time and effort than it is worth.

It would be great to have more automated tools available, but until the hosts get serious about the obvious scrapers, nothing will stop them.

There is also the point that one host made after I contacted them which was something like this: "Well yes the site has your entire blog post, but we see no monetization of their site, and they link back to you at the end of the stolen content. Legally there is nothing we can do."

Sorry to vent, but it does get frustrating.

Wow! I recently found a whole bunch of 404 errors in Google Webmaster Tools. They were also non existent directories, but many different ones. I wondered where Google was coming up with them. Because they are many different directories, it may not be workfriendly, but it is still curious. I think the htaccess code is a good idea anyway. My htaccess is getting very long!

Yes it does, and now I add a follow-up request! If you, with your expertise in this area, feel the need to move from Feedburner, then we should do the same. When you successfully do the move from Feedburner, could you do a post explaining the why and how?

I know I probably have far fewer subscribers than PT, but I have four different feeds at Feedburner. I have the full and comments, but I also have excerpts and headlines only feeds which are created by Feedburner from my original full feed. I have subscribers for each, but I don't know if I there are plugins that can do the same thing if I discontinue Feedburner. My recent experience with scrapers tells me that they do not only steal the full feed, but also the excerpts feed, so I know they are getting it from Feedburner.

Hi Jonathan - I read your feed, but I don't think you use either of these? Maybe I am missing what they actually do to the feed. Are you using either of these?

This is interesting. Especially since the tax dollars of ALL taxpayers support the FBI, I think the logo should be available to all.

btw... I had no trouble with your English. ;-)

-Will

So far, it seems like no takers on this. I did notice something else a few times since I upgraded to WP2.3.

When I edit an existing post that already has a Numly number, I used to get issued a new number. This makes sense as if I change the original article, technically it becomes different. This is not happening since I upgraded to 2.3. Now I can edit a post and a new Numly number is not generated.

Has anyone else noticed this. I wonder if it is the plugin acting differently with 2.3 or if it something on the site. I'll ask Chris about it.

-Will